Kelley Eskridge (20 page)

Close Doors
button and
the metal and glass wrapped themselves tight around her. She breathed
in tight gasps that did not seem to reach her lungs. Alone, alone in
the place of her fear, with a great emptiness below her.

On the control panel an arm's length away
was a button labeled, simply,

Down
.

She thought of Bear, of Mist. Tiger. Was
she ready to understand how it felt when the bottom dropped out of the
world and you had no choice but to fall and fall and fall until you
stopped forever? Was she ready to learn what it meant to die because
someone who loved you was a stupid idiot and killed you by mistake?
Still a stupid idiot, she thought, wanting suddenly to hurt herself.

You killed your web and you will drop
yourself down
this goddamn shaft a hundred thousand times if that's what it takes to
make you understand what that means stupid stupid stupid god I'm scared
I'm scared I wish
—

—and her mouth filled with saliva and
rust, and she leaned forward and stretched out her finger for the
button, she reached—

And she went down. The world fell out from
under her and she flew, like one of the birds that she passed in an
eyeblink as she hurtled down, down, down. And it was over so quickly.
The car was falling and falling and then, without any transition, it
was suddenly still, and she was stepping out onto the Mirabile plaza,
stumbling across to the nearest guide rail, hanging onto it while she
tried to heave her nonexistent guts out onto the marble floor.

And she knew some of what her web knew
now. She knew that when you were dying, you could feel fear and anger
and surprise, but mostly what you felt was some version of

wait, wait, I'm not ready
!

She sat with her back to the railing for a
long time, watching the birds. Then she left Mirabile, walking through
the iron canyons and the steel valleys of shadows, turning over and
over in her mind the astonishment of not being ready. But why was she
surprised? When had she ever been ready for anything? She wasn't ready
to break Tiger's nose or ready to be a Hope or ready to see her life
smeared across two hundred meters of Mirabile's pristine floor. She
leaned against the bow rail of the ferry and let the wind and the cold
hard spray force her eyes into slits while Ko Island grew out of the
horizon. Could a person ever be ready for things? The ferry rounded the
curve in the channel and headed for the docking tunnel, and the water
wasn't so rough now; she could open her eyes and see the Ko ferry
station gleaming like a polished silver sculpture, the gulls chattering
as they pulled crabs apart on the beach, and beyond it the greenbelt
that she hadn't visited in too long. What was the opposite of ready?
She remembered feeling like a piece of sea glass tumbled into a muddy
no-shape, worn away bit by bit, and how she had welcomed it and even
helped to grind herself down. Maybe the opposite of ready was
shapeless; well, that was no good, she'd done that and it had only
given her a whole new set of things that she wasn't ready for. She
watched as the island stretched forward and the arms of the harbor
curved around her. The sky was a thick glaze of blue. The air smelled
of salt and lemon. She felt as if she were about to understand
something simple and important. Light flashed in her eyes; she shook
her head impatiently. Something simple and important; she waited for
it. Another flicker at the edge of her vision, this time not light but
darkness. She frowned toward the beach; dark vertical streaks rippled
through the air; one of the gulls winked out.

Suddenly everything blinked into gray
tones; the sky, the sea, her hands gray on the gray ferry rail. The air
in front of her tore again, and through it she saw, horribly, a huge
face in a gray medical mask, a face that filled the world and she began
to understand but it was already too late and she thought wildly wait,
wait—

PART IV
SOLITAIRE

12

THE WORLD CLICKED INTO PLACE AS IF
SOMEONE HAD
adjusted the focus on its projector. She was in an
institutional interview room, somewhere like a hospital or jail; it had
that particular smell of multiple people and uncertain outcomes. She
sat at a table with a cup raised halfway to her mouth; she could taste
grapefruit juice, with more dribbling down her chin and spotting the
robe that was pulled tight around her.
What's
happening
? Her right hand trembled as she set the cup down;
she misjudged the distance and clunked it hard against the table. And
then she saw, oh god, there was another person in the room. She froze.
She could see it from the corner of her eye. The first other person
in…how many years? Surely not eight years already. Surely not. She
blinked, blinked again.

“Ah, you're here,” it said. “Well. Never
mind. We were pretty much finished anyway.” A beat. “Welcome back.”

Jackal pressed her lips together so
it—he—wouldn't see them trembling. She didn't understand. She blinked
harder, began to rock slightly. Where was Ko? Where was this? She
looked around the room in small snapshot glances, moving only her eyes.
Blink. The man in the chair to her right. Was he real? Blink. A small
black diamond datagem in the back of her left hand, in the soft place
between her thumb and index finger. Was that real? It hurt when she
pressed it. Blink. A chewed piece of toast on a plastic plate. Did she
eat that? How long had she been here? Blink. No windows. She could see
no windows. Blink. She could see no door. Suddenly she was sure that
she was still in VC, back in her cell, and this person must be the
crocodile come back for some terrible new work, grown so strong that it
had taken shape outside her, and this was very bad, very bad, so she
tried desperately to make some sound come out of her clenched throat,
tried to raise her weak and trembling arms against it, ready to fight
again in any way she must. “Oh, criminy,” the crocodile said, sounding
exasperated, and pulled a phone out of its coat pocket. “She's awake
and she's spinning, can somebody get in here please?” There was a noise
behind her, a sound exactly like a door opening, and she sagged in
relief even before she felt the sting of the syrette gun at the side of
her neck.

The tranquilizer smoothed through her. She
put her hand to the sore place where the injection had just gone in; my
neck, she thought, my hand. She touched her arms, put her hands up to
her face and felt her cheekbones and the small scar by her right
eyebrow. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.” Her real body, the one that she had
missed wrenchingly at first and then forgotten utterly during the last
glorious year on Ko. She made small experimental movements: she didn't
need to stand to realize how fragile she was. She wouldn't be kicking
down any walls for a while; she wouldn't be walking the Ko cliffs or
riding through the campus like a two-wheeled dervish until she was a
lot stronger than this—

Then she remembered that she wouldn't be
doing those things anyway, because she was never going back to Ko. They
didn't want her. She wasn't their Hope anymore. She would never again
see the beach or the greenbelt or the fish in the garden pond. No more
Frankenbear. She put a hand to her throat; the goddess on the chain,
Snow's gift, had vanished back into the runnels of her brain. She began
to shake again in spite of the sedative. “Oh,” she said again, “Oh,”
and then she began to cry for all the lost things. She was too tired to
weep, too beaten to howl out her misery, so she just sat at the table
with her mouth open and let the tears run. Eventually, someone bundled
her out of the chair and into a bed somewhere, and she cried herself to
sleep.

She woke covered in a stinking, cold sweat.
Ick, she thought fuzzily, and rolled herself out of damp sheets.

She found that she was naked and in a
small cell with another person; a woman with hair the color of red clay
and a flat, amused face peering over the side of the upper bunk. The
entire wall beyond the foot of the beds was barred; Jackal could see
directly into the cell opposite, where one man lay curled on his side
on the lower bed while another paced back and forth along the length of
the bars, regarding Jackal with no expression. Jackal looked away, but
she was no longer scared. She remembered everything; and she understood
why her heart would be pounding and her body frantically ridding itself
of poisons while she slept. All those months of accumulated toxins and
drugs; no wonder her mouth tasted like metal and her head throbbed. But
she was a bit stronger; she could stand, and she could hobble the two
steps to the partition that gave some measure of privacy to the toilet
and sink at the back of the cell. Private from the open bars, but not
from her cellmate, who swiveled her head to follow Jackal's progress.
Fuck you, Jackal thought wearily.

She found a thin towel that was rough from
too many sterilizing washes; it didn't so much absorb the slick film
from her skin as scrape it away, and she felt raw by the time she was
done. She splashed cold water on her face; then her belly muscles
cramped, and she dropped herself onto the toilet and hoped her guts
would remember how to work. Acrid green urine spattered into the bowl,
and then a stream of thin watery shit that burned coming out. She
gritted her teeth and cleaned herself up, and tottered back to the bed.
She wanted to lie down and rest, but the sheets were still clammy. So
she dressed instead, in a coverall and slippers she found in a plastic
storage bag at the foot of the bed.

The woman above her watched interestedly
until Jackal pulled her slippers on: then she pulled her head back and
disappeared from view. That was fine with Jackal. She did not want to
talk; she felt profoundly removed, Jackal-under-glass. She wondered,
from her distant interior vantage point, why she had been pulled out of
VC early, and how long she might be in this new place, and whether she
cared.

Some time later a loud bell rang and the
cells opened. Guards lined everyone up, about two hundred prisoners
including Jackal and her silent cellmate. Too many people: it was hard
to step out of the safety of the cage. Some of the prisoners had the
strained look of animals caught in jacklight, trying to be invisible:
the others were restless in small, compulsive movements that made
Jackal hiss with irritation. She tried to relax, remembering Neill's
teaching: model the behavior and expect others to follow. The memory
surprised her with a swell of grief. Not now, please not now, she
thought, and then the guards were shuffling them along and she gave
herself over to the small release of moving forward.

They came to a large room set up
lecture-style, cheap institutional desks and chairs facing a table with
a projector and keyboard. Everyone sat in silence, and that was an odd
thing. In dozens of research activities, she'd never seen a group this
size remain silent, even when the researchers made clear that talking
would be punished. They'd demonstrated, and Jackal believed, that it
was human nature to interact, to seek connection in times of stress or
uncertain circumstances.

This is wrong, she thought, I have to talk
to someone. She looked to her left, met the bright gaze of her
cellmate. It was hard to make herself speak, but she managed to
whisper, “Do you know what this is about?” Then there was a guard in
front of her saying, “Shut up,” and the cellmate blinked equally
brightly at the guard and turned away as if she'd heard nothing, seen
nothing. No one else even looked their way. The guard returned to his
position at the side of the room. Nothing more happened for a while,
except that the flat-faced woman began to subvocalize a tune that
Jackal recognized after the sixth repetition as The Itsy-Bitsy Spider
song. After the seventeenth round, a door opened at the front of the
room and two women walked in.

Someone behind Jackal giggled, and Jackal
felt her face twitch in sympathy. It wasn't just the difference in
height, but the entire jangle of body language between the two. The
shorter woman wanted to be authoritative, that was clear from her pace
and her jutting chin. She wore what Jackal recognized as a medium-range
business suit, in probably the only shade of pink that would suit her
sallow white skin and gold hair. Clearly, no one had ever told her that
an ambitious person should always have good shoes: she clack-clacked
across the floor in her cheap heels, seeming fussy and fraught in
comparison with the woman who ambled beside her. This woman was tall;
she could stroll and still keep pace with her companion. Her bald head
drew Jackal's attention up her body, past the shoulders that weren't
quite relaxed. When the head turned, Jackal felt her breath hitch: the
woman's eyes were entirely red, shining like animal eyes in her dark
face. Lenses, Jackal realized, after the beast-gaze had glided past
her; but she was still unsettled.

The white woman settled down in a chair at
one corner of the table. The black woman stood in front of the table,
reaching behind her to power up the projector and pull the keyboard
within reach. “I will have your attention now,” she said in a voice
that carried without strain through the room. “We're presenting in
English today. Anyone who is uncomfortable with English may request an
additional session with an interpreter.” She continued without waiting.
“I am Crichton. I am the case officer assigned to each of you. I am the
center of your universe at this moment. Mind me now.”

She keyed up a slide onto the projector
screen: a list of about sixty or seventy names. “We're going to divide
you into groups. The people on the list are the Red Group. You will
identify yourself when I read your name, and you will follow the
directions of this officer—” she pointed at a guard, who hefted her
automatic weapon self-importantly “—to another location. Andressen.”
She waited until a tall man stood uncertainly. “Over there. Azkhanzin.
Brecht.” She read through the list impassively. Jackal's name was not
included.